How Hard Is Phantom Blade Zero?

ok so Sekiro is the game PB Zero gets compared to most and honestly it's a fair comparison because both use a posture breaking combat system where parrying is your primary defensive tool but they feel different in practice and I've beaten Sekiro like 4 times so I'm pretty confident about this comparison and tbh if you've beaten Sekiro you can handle PB Zero but there's gonna be an adjustment period where you unlearn some habits and honestly that adjustment period can be kinda rough because your muscle memory is gonna betray you repeatedly and you'll be pressing the wrong buttons at the worst possible moments and dying in really stupid ways that make you feel like you've never played an action game before in your life

so PB Zero's parry window is slightly wider than Sekiro's and it's honestly closer to Lies of P's generous timing than Sekiro's razor thin frames you'll land parries more consistently here and it doesn't feel like the game is actively trying to make you suffer which is honestly refreshing and I'm not saying it's easy but you have more room for error and your timing doesn't need to be frame perfect like Sekiro sometimes demands and tbh I think this is a better design choice because losing a fight because you were 2 frames late on a deflect just feels terrible and makes you want to uninstall the game

and look Sekiro is way harsher when you mess up in PB Zero a missed parry means you eat the hit and lose health in Sekiro a missed deflect against certain bosses is a one shot and you're dead before you even register what happened PB Zero gives you more chances to recover and you can actually learn from your mistakes instead of just staring at a loading screen and that loading screen time in Sekiro honestly adds up to hours of your life you'll never get back and it's the kind of punishment that doesn't teach you anything it just makes you mad and wastes your time

but here's the thing PB Zero rewards aggression way more than Sekiro does the Sha-Chi system means that sitting back and waiting for openings is literally costing you damage potential and you're basically punishing yourself by playing defensively Sekiro lets you play more reactively and kinda wait for the enemy to commit before you respond but in PB Zero you gotta be the one pushing the pace and dictating the fight and honestly once you get into the rhythm of attack parry attack parry Sha-Chi dump it feels so much better than Sekiro's more defensive posture management dance that always felt a little bit like you were just waiting for the boss to finish their turn before you got to play the game again

ngl I love Sekiro and it's probably my favorite FromSoft game overall but PB Zero's combat flow once it clicks is just more satisfying to me and that's a hill I'm willing to die on

Bottom line: so if you beat Sekiro you have the mechanical foundation to handle PB Zero the parry timing will feel generous by comparison and the main adjustment is learning to stay aggressive rather than waiting for openings and honestly once you get into the rhythm of attack parry attack parry Sha-Chi dump it feels so much better than Sekiro's more defensive posture management dance

so Elden Ring is harder in the sense that it gives you fewer tools to deal with pressure no Sha-Chi powered special moves no Ghoststep teleport dodges no Phantom Edge abilities but Elden Ring is also easier in the sense that you can overlevel and summon help and use broken builds to trivialize literally any fight and I mean literally any fight you can walk into Malenia at level 300 with mimic tear and a bleed build and just delete her in 30 seconds and it's almost boring at that point but in PB Zero there's no such escape hatch you have to learn the fights and honestly that's what makes it more rewarding in the end because every victory feels like you actually earned it with your own hands not because you spent 10 hours farming runes or watched a YouTube video about the most broken build

so Elden Ring wins on build flexibility hands down you can break the game with the right build like completely shatter it into pieces and there are hundreds of ways to do it PB Zero balances its weapons more tightly there's no Comet Azur equivalent that deletes bosses in five seconds and part of me misses that kind of power fantasy but honestly it also means every victory feels earned and legit and nobody can say you cheesed it or got carried or whatever because there's literally no cheese to be had the game forces you to be good at it and that's kinda beautiful in its own frustrating way

and PB Zero bosses have more complex movesets on average like Elden Ring has harder individual bosses Malenia is still the queen of pain and suffering and I've died to her so many times I lost count around attempt 60 but PB Zero's average boss is mechanically denser with more phases and more mixups and more stuff you need to learn and remember and you can't just memorize 3 patterns and call it a day because the bosses in this game will switch things up on you mid fight and suddenly everything you learned in the first 10 attempts is useless and you need to figure out a whole new set of responses

also this is the big one Elden Ring lets you summon spirit ashes or other players for every single boss PB Zero has no multiplayer summons and very limited NPC summoning you have to beat every boss solo no help no shortcuts no calling your overleveled friend with the double bleed curved swords build and honestly if you relied on spirit ashes to clear Elden Ring PB Zero is gonna feel like a completely different tier of difficulty and you're gonna have to develop actual mechanical skill instead of just managing aggro while your mimic does all the work and tbh that's gonna be a rude awakening for a lot of people who thought they were good at soulslikes but were really just good at using the tools Elden Ring gave them to avoid engaging with the mechanics

btw if you were someone who summoned for literally every boss in Elden Ring and never learned to dodge properly you're in for a pretty rough time here and I'm not judging I summoned for half the bosses on my first playthrough too but just know that PB Zero is gonna force you to learn skills you probably never developed and the first few hours are gonna be humbling

Bottom line: if you beat Elden Ring without summons you're ready for this and you'll probably enjoy it a lot if you relied on spirit ashes and multiplayer to clear bosses PB Zero will be an adjustment because you have to learn every fight yourself and that's kind of the whole point honestly

so Black Myth Wukong shares some visual DNA with PB Zero both are Unreal Engine 5 Chinese developed action games with flashy combat and crazy animations and mythical beast bosses but Wukong is noticeably easier especially at the start and I say this as someone who loved Wukong and beat it twice and still plays it sometimes just for the spectacle but PB Zero is built different when it comes to difficulty and honestly the gap between these two games in terms of how hard they are is bigger than most people expect because Wukong has so many systems that let you just skip the hard parts entirely

Wukong gives you a gourd with multiple sips from the start and you can upgrade it and get more sips and basically always have healing PB Zero has no healing items at all your health restores at bell checkpoints and that's it this makes PB Zero's resource management way more punishing in long zones where you're limping from one checkpoint to the next with 10 percent HP praying you don't run into anything scary and I've had so many moments in PB Zero where I had zero health items and was literally one hit from death for like 5 minutes straight and every enemy encounter felt like a boss fight because any mistake meant starting the entire zone over and ugh that feeling is honestly the worst but also kind of amazing when you pull it off

also Wukong's immobilize spell and pluck of many let you bypass learning certain boss patterns entirely you can just freeze a boss delete half its health bar and then run away until your cooldowns are back it's basically a skip the mechanics button PB Zero has no skip the mechanics button and every boss has to be learned and understood and respected and there's no spell you can cast that lets you ignore what the boss is doing you either learn the patterns or you die and die and die until you finally get it right and that's just how it is

and I'm not even joking PB Zero's first real boss is harder than anything in Wukong's first two chapters combined Wukong has a gentler onboarding curve where you ease into the difficulty and learn at your own pace PB Zero throws you into the deep end immediately and some people are gonna bounce off it hard and honestly I almost did I was stuck on the first boss for like 2 hours straight and seriously considered uninstalling and going back to something that didn't hate me personally and I've beaten every FromSoft game multiple times so if I struggled that much the average player is gonna get absolutely demolished and probably leave a negative review on Steam about how unfair the game is which is kinda sad because it's not unfair you just need to learn it

tbh Wukong is more of an action spectacle with soulslike elements rather than a punishing soulslike itself and that's fine that's what it was trying to be but if you're coming from Wukong expecting PB Zero to be a similar experience you're gonna be in for a shock and not the fun kind of shock

ok honestly Lies of P is probably the fairest comparison in terms of overall difficulty both games have parry centric combat both punish passive play and both have bosses with multi phase fights that demand consistency and endurance and you can't just memorize patterns you have to actually get good at the mechanics and both games will test your patience in ways that make you question your life choices but in a good way you know and I've put something like 80 hours into Lies of P across multiple playthroughs so I feel pretty qualified to compare these two and tbh they're close enough that your preference is gonna come down to which combat system feels better to you personally rather than any objective difficulty difference

so Lies of P's rally system gives you health back for attacking after blocking which means you can make mistakes and recover and honestly I love that mechanic because it rewards you for being aggressive even after you mess up PB Zero doesn't have this at all damage sticks and every hit matters like you can't just facetank a combo then rally back the health before the boss's next attack and that makes PB Zero more punishing in sustained fights where you're taking chip damage over time

on the other hand bell checkpoints in PB Zero are more frequent than Lies of P's Stargazers so you spend less time running back to bosses after you die and that honestly makes a huge difference for the overall frustration level because nothing kills your motivation faster than a 2 minute runback for a boss you've already died to 40 times and you know the runback perfectly but you still have to do it every single time which is just disrespectful of your time and PB Zero mostly avoids that problem

PB Zero also has more weapon types and clearer build identities and you can really feel the difference between a bleed build and a raw damage build and a crit focused setup and they all play genuinely differently which is cool Lies of P's weapon assembly system is deeper in some ways but harder to optimize without a guide and you can spend hours messing with blade and handle combinations and still end up with something that's worse than just using the starting weapon the whole game and I've definitely been there and wasted so much time in that menu only to go back to the basic setup that just worked better anyway

anyway both games are gonna test your patience and make you question whether you actually enjoy video games or just enjoy the feeling of finally beating something that's been destroying you for hours and at this point I'm honestly not sure which one it is for me anymore but I keep playing them so something must be working

so Nioh 2 has a steeper learning curve because of its stance system ki pulse mechanics and loot management and honestly the amount of systems in that game is overwhelming like you open the menu for the first time and there's 47 different things to learn before you even start fighting enemies and it's a lot PB Zero strips a lot of that complexity out but compensates with more aggressive enemies that hit harder and give you less room to breathe and in some ways that makes PB Zero feel harder even though it's technically simpler to learn and stuff like that and I've spent probably 120 hours in Nioh 2 and I still don't fully understand the yokai abilities system and at this point I'm too afraid to ask

Nioh 2 is harder to learn three stances per weapon ki pulsing soul core abilities guardian spirits yokai shift it's a lot to process and remember and your brain just melts trying to keep track of everything PB Zero's Sha-Chi system is simpler to understand but harder to master in execution and you'll get the basics in 10 minutes but you'll still be discovering new interactions 30 hours in and honestly I kinda prefer PB Zero's approach because it's less about memorizing menus and more about actually executing in combat which is what these games should be about in the first place imo

and PB Zero enemies hit harder relative to your health pool in Nioh 2 you can tank multiple hits with the right armor and build and there are legit tank builds that let you absorb pretty much anything in PB Zero three hits from a boss will kill you regardless of your build and there's no tank build that lets you face tank combos you have to engage with the defensive mechanics or you die simple as that and honestly I've tried to make a tanky build work in PB Zero spent like 5 hours farming the right gear and the right stat distribution and it just doesn't work the game is designed to punish passivity and force you to learn parrying and dodging and anything that tries to bypass that goes against the entire design philosophy of the combat system

tbh Nioh 2's endgame builds can get so broken that you're basically playing a completely different game from the one you started with and that power progression is really satisfying in its own way PB Zero never lets you get that powerful you always feel like you're one mistake away from death no matter how optimized your build is and that's either the best thing about the game or the worst thing depending on what kind of player you are you get the idea